Oliver Kruger, Golden Youth, Cokkie Snoei Gallery Rotterdam, June 7 until June 21, 2015.
About:
Through his ongoing series ‘Golden Youth’, Kruger documents new trends in Johannesburg’s youth culture. Artist Oliver Kruger finds his subjects in the urban metropolises of Johannesburg and uses portraiture to expand on the aesthetics and tradition of African studio photography.
“Essentially, I find that people, as they are, are the most interesting thing to photograph. Our experience of the world is governed by our interaction with the people around us, who shape it and change it, and make it interesting and richer. Their mutability is what makes it interesting, in that, a minute or a year or a decade from now they will be different and will have changed, and I like the idea of having made an image of them at a particular time and state of being or between states of being.
I worked with fashion photographers and started shooting thinking that that was what I’d like to do, but found that it could not hold my attention and that for me it was an exercise in photography, rather than an end in itself. I still enjoy interesting fashion photography, though.” (from interview in Between 2 and 5, January 2015)
